Bestselling French author Gerard de Villiers, who died on Thursday, is getting a posthumous crack at the North American market. Knopf Doubleday's Vintage Books has inked a deal to publish a handful of works by the novelist, with the first title set for 2014. The Random House imprint said the effort marks "the first major launch" of Villiers's fiction in the U.S. and Canada.
Villiers died at 83 and, in his New York Times obituary, was noted for the "raffish" spy thriller series, S.A.S., which the paper said sold over 1 million copies. The paper also noted that Villiers, whose books were rife with "kinky sex and gunplay," was often compared to Ian Fleming, the author who created James Bond. The first book of Villiers that Vintage will release is The Madmen of Benghazi.
